Popular Assembly (Aurelia)
The Popular Assembly of the High Kingdom of Aurelia is one of the High Kingdom's two chambers of legislature (the other being the Senate), and the one with most power. Established in the mid-16th century as the Popular Assembly of Albion after the Princes' Rising led the King at that time to establish a chamber for the "populace", in contrast with the much-older Senate. The use of "Popular" here was deliberate as Albion, later Albion-Hibernia, liked evoking Rome. Over time, especially after the Popular Acts of 1749, 1812, 1874 and 1913, the PA got more power and grew in clout, rivalling the Senate by the 1850s and surpassing it by the 1900s. Liberals/Farmer-Liberals preferred the Popular Assembly, in contrast to the Senatorial Conservatives. A bombing by a Communist terrorist group acting in support of the UAIC during the Grand War brought down the old building that served as the assembly point for the Popular Assembly and the Senate. Thankfully, both were in recess so the death number was low. The two chambers would convene temporarily in Canterbury ("The Saxish Parliament") before the Constitutional Convention decided on New Amsterdam as the new capital city. The building erected in New Amsterdam for the Parliament was decidely in the architectural traditions that reached their height in the 1930s. The "Decorativist" type of architecture, pioneered in the Brazilian Empire, grew rapidly in popularity in the 1930s and was picked by the architect to be used as the style in which Parliament's Building would be made. While waiting for the new building to be created, the Senate and Assembly convened in an closed rugby stadium. The new building was opened to fanfare in 1935, and the first season of Parliament in their permanent building started the following Monday. The Constitutional Convention, thanks to strong pressure from the Farmer-Liberal government (which was sure in the knowledge they would plummet in support due to the Grand War), implemented Single-Transferrable Vote for the election system used to elect Assembly Members. Under pressure from the government, the Convention also established the "Secondary Opposition", something much-criticised for the fact that it was transparently made to support the (Ecologist-)Farmer-Liberals from being seen as irrelevant, by basically treating them as a smaller version of the Primary Opposition. The war in China (often called "the Second Grand War") was voted through by the Parliament, incensed at China's belligerent expansionism even though a Democratic AM pointed out the sheer hypocrisy of Aurelia in moving to contain a country from doing what they exactly did in the past. The old "Three-Party System" (of the socialist Democrats, the centre-right Conservatives and the centrist Farmer-Liberals) fell apart in the 1970s-1990s, creating the unsure politics that exist today. The Farmer-Liberals had an upsurge of "classical" liberal thought that proved incompatible with their support for farm subsidies, and the "New Liberals" walked out and formed their own party. The Democratic Party's traditional walking the tightrope between their left-wing base and the centrist swing voters ended up alienating the extremists, which walked out and formed the Social Democrats, an explicitly socialist party criticising the Democrats' milquetoastness. Green concerns would rise and rise, powering the small Ecologist Party, which entered Parliament in 1982. They would prove more influential than their size would have suggested, and cemented a very close relationship with Farmer-Liberal (both being quite similar in a fair bit of ways), leading to a merger. Regionalism would spring up seemingly everywhere in the 1970s and 1980s. Nova Hibernia (Pairti an Phobail), Quebec (Bloc Quebecois), Louisiana (Parti Cadien), even Albion itself! (Albion Nationalist League). Many wondered if this was indeed the end of Aurelia. But despite a close scare in Quebec in 1995, there was no falling-apart of Aurelia. But the chaotic party system would not cease. Progressive Future, an technocratic party led by scientists, was established in 1998 over concerns that science and technology was getting short-shrifted by the government. They surged to 8 seats in the election of 2000 and have been in Parliament since. Notoriously weak at a state level due to their very high focus on Parliament, at the disadvantage of any state-level parties they have (if any). The Conservatives' "New Conservatism", dropping social issues in order to appeal to more people about economics, alienated the far-right, and thus created the Christian Unionists, a far-right theocratic party that was at times predicted to win huge amounts of seats in the 2016 election, but imploded due to its' incoherent structure, being more a coalition of small far-right parties than anything like a normal party. They won no seats this election, despite winning seats at a state level previously.